Last year, conventional wisdom had it that containers were much less secure than virtual machines (VMs)! Since containers have such thin separating walls; it was easy to paint these back door risks with a broad brush. Here’s a reality check: Front door attacks and unpatched vulnerabilities are much more likely than these backdoor hacks.

While many people want a universal “easy button installer,” they also want it to work on their unique snowflake of infrastructures, tools, networks and operating systems. Because there is so much needful variation and change, it is better to give up on open source projects trying to own an installer and instead focus on making their required components more resilient and portable.

Can OpenStack take the crown as cloud king? In our increasingly hybrid infrastructure environment, the path to the top means making it easier to user to defect from the current leaders (Amazon AWS; VMware) instead of asking them to blaze new trails. Here are my notes from a recent discussion about that exact topic…

As “open source eats software” the profit imperative becomes ever more important to figure out. We have to find ways to fund this development or acknowledge that software will simply become waste IP and largess from mega brands. The later outcome is not particularly appealing or innovative.